Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 2 GB Graphics Card Review. Page 3

The most important question, which is of great interest to many users, is the following: will the overclocked GeForce GTX 670 be able to catch up with a more expensive GeForce GTX 680? Our today’s review will answer this and many other questions about this new product you might have.

Overclocking Potential

It didn’t take us long to check out the overclocking capabilities of our GeForce GTX 670 because we had already learned the typical frequency range of the GK104 chip from our GeForce GTX 680 tests. The junior model can hardly have a higher-quality GPU. So, we overclocked it to a GPU clock rate of 1070 MHz (1253 MHz in boost mode according to our monitoring tools) and to a memory clock rate of 7028 MHz.

The memory chips reached a rather high frequency whereas the GPU didn’t impress us with its overclocking potential. Hopefully, off-the-shelf versions of this card are going to be better in terms of overclocking.

At the higher GPU and memory clock rates, the card’s GPU was 83°C hot at a fan speed of 2340 RPM.

We wish we could also measure the temperature of the power components on such a densely populated PCB, but the reference GeForce GTX 670 lacks appropriate sensors.

Testbed Configuration and Testing Methodology

Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 and its competitors were tested in a system with the following configuration:

In order to lower the dependence of the graphics cards performance on the overall platform speed, I overclocked our 32 nm six-core CPU with the multiplier set at 37x, BCLK frequency set at 125 MHz and “Load-Line Calibration” enabled to 4.625 GHz. The processor Vcore was increased to 1.46 V in the mainboard BIOS:

Hyper-Threading technology was enabled. 16 GB of system DDR3 memory worked at 2 GHz frequency with 9-10-10-28 timings and 1.65V voltage.

The test session started on May 14, 2012. All tests were performed in Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 with all critical updates as of that date and the following drivers:

The graphics cards were tested in two resolutions: 1920x1080 and 2560x1600. The tests were performed in two image quality modes: “Quality+AF16x” – default texturing quality in the drivers with enabled 16x anisotropic filtering and “Quality+ AF16x+MSAA 4(8)x” with enabled 16x anisotropic filtering and full screen 4x or 8x antialiasing if the average framerate was high enough for comfortable gaming experience. We enabled anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing from the game settings. If the corresponding options were missing, we changed these settings in the Control Panels of Catalyst and GeForce drivers. We also disabled Vsync there. There were no other changes in the driver settings.

The list of games and applications used in this test session includes two popular semi-synthetic benchmarking suites, one technical demo and 15 games of various genres:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (DirectX 11) – version 1.6.02, Enhanced Dynamic DX11 Lighting profile with all parameters manually set at their maximums, we used our custom cop03 demo on the Backwater map;

Hard Reset Demo (DirectX 9) – benchmark built into the demo version with Ultra image quality settings, one test run;

Batman: Arkham City (DirectX 11) – version 1.2, maximum graphics quality settings, physics disabled, two sequential runs of the benchmark built into the game.

Battlefield 3 (DirectX 11) – version 1.3, all image quality settings set to “Ultra”, two successive runs of a scripted scene from the beginning of the “Going Hunting” mission 110 seconds long.

If the game allowed recording the minimal fps readings, they were also added to the charts. We ran each game test or benchmark twice and took the best result for the diagrams, but only if the difference between them didn’t exceed 1%. If it did exceed 1%, we ran the tests at least one more time to achieve repeatability of results.